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Interestingly, Evernote, which I use much more frequently than OneNote, generally has good release notes, and its updater actually displays the release notes when it asks if you'd like to update. It leaves me feeling more in control of my own computing experience.

On a good note, it appears that Microsoft has finally fixed a critical bug in Microsoft Auto Update that has been driving me crazy for over a year.

Ever since upgrading from Office 2011 to Office365 (and Office 2016), I've found that Auto Update would frequently hang on my macOS 10.11.6 (El Capitan) system. Launching it would result in a forever-bouncing icon. No amount of force-quitting or process killing would get it to launch. I would have to reboot (which would take a very long time, probably due to some process hanging and not actually terminating), and then Auto Update would work - at least for a short time, sometimes only long enough to update one app (e.g. Word or Excel or Auto Update itself) before hanging again, forcing yet another reboot.

This was incredibly frustrating, as you can imagine. And it only happened on the ElCap system. On my other Mac (running Sierra), there was no such problem.

Anyway, it appears that Microsoft finally fixed this problem. Since version 4.9.0 (March 14, 2019 release), it has been working as expected on my ElCap system. They don't say what changed other than "Bug fixes and update installation performance improvements", but they clearly fixed something that was broken for a very long time.

I can confirm that Office 2016 16.6.8 (Home & Business perpetual license) under macOS Sierra (10.12.6) would launch, allow me to click the Sign In button, allow me to enter the email address of my Microsoft ID, then get stuck "loading" and never ask for my password. Updating the computer to macOS Mojave (10.14.3) solved the problem. If I have to try this on a machine I intend to keep on Sierra, I'll report back if downgrading to a prior release of Office 2016 worked.

I ran afoul of this Sierra activation issue recently. Upgraded a client's Mac Pro 5,1 with an SSD to bring the performance of the computer back. Cloned everything over, and it did a wonderful job with everything, just what she was hoping for... until we tried to reactivate her perpetual license for Office 2019. Would not get past the sign-in process. Entered the email address for the account, and it just spun. Tried removing Office and reinstalling, removing along with using the license removal tool, no luck.

She spoke with Microsoft, and they were unable to get it through the activation process. They said they knew about the Sierra activation issue and that the current workaround was to upgrade the macOS, which resolves the issue, or wait until they get it working again.

She waited for a week or so, since she did not have a Metal-capable video card. She finally decided she didn't want to wait any longer. Tracked down a Metal-capable card and installed it along with Mojave. Office activation went through fine, and she was up and running. As you would expect, a few days later she gets this...

This is Joel Samuel from Microsoft Escalations.
This E-mail is in regards to the case number - xxxxxxxxxxxx.
I tried to reach you and left a Voice Mail.
You had been facing issues in activating the Office Suite on you MAC and the patch has been
fixed by the back end team and just wanted to confirm whether everything is working fine.
If yes, please reply to this E-mail.
If this is wrong, please call us at 1800-936-5700 or 866-425-4826.

I'll have to try again. I bought my wife a 2017 MacBook Pro. It came with macOS 10.12 Sierra on it. I installed our Office 2016 home subscription and got the exact thing that you describe. It's been a week or so since the last time I tried. We also had an Office 2011 Home that I installed instead - it works fine.

Towards the end of last year I finally took the plunge, once Office 2019 was available, to purchase and upgraded from Office 2011.

For the most part this new Excel has been pretty stable, running on Sierra - things sort of work well enough to consider it a pretty decent and perky upgrade all in all. Primarily, I use Excel, so this is the focus here. My modified keyboard shortcuts were kept intact, which I was glad to see. The searching is a bit more tedious in comparison to how it worked in 2011, as is cut and paste, so an extra mouse click here and extra copy there tend to slow things down a bit from how I was able to do them before. But most things run significantly faster, so otherwise a pretty good trade-off.

There was one persistent issue/bug with the new Excel I kept experiencing that I was finally able to find a workaround for, as no fix for it had been put in place each time the software was updated. It's not unusual for me to have several rather large spreadsheets open at the same time. And to cut to the chase, it turns out that having AutoRecover enabled (every 10 minutes) would result in a few characters getting lost as I was typing along when AutoRecover kicked in. Presumably, it was saving off copies of each of the opened spreadsheets and, while doing so, ignoring the keyboard for a second or two. I'm pretty sure this type of thing didn't happen with Excel 2011. So, at this point, AutoRecover is turned off, and all is well, no lost characters, and it's been quite a while since I clicked in one cell and ended up in another, and perhaps a few other quirky things that no longer seem to happen.

The one other thing that I am glad to see has disappeared is that every so often in the old Excel a memory issue of some sort would occur and then I eventually would be unable to save the spreadsheet I had been editing. And most likely this is where some of the spreadsheet corruption I used to see originated from. No more of that that I've noticed with the new Excel.

... Having AutoRecover enabled (every 10 minutes) would result in a few characters getting lost as I was typing along when AutoRecover kicked in. Presumably, it was saving off copies of each of the opened spreadsheets and, while doing so, ignoring the keyboard for a second or two. I'm pretty sure this type of thing didn't happen with Excel 2011.

I've noticed this, as well, starting in Excel 2016. It appears that they no longer buffer keystrokes while saving (or maybe whenever the UI is blocked on a long-running operation). Presumably this is to prevent a bunch of spurious keystrokes (possibly entered in frustration while the UI is blocked) from messing up the document.

Unfortunately, it gets in the way when you're not pounding keys in frustration, like when I will type Command-S to save while working and expect to be able to keep on typing - only now I have to wait for the save to finish, which is a lot more frustrating than the way it used to be - especially when saving to a remote/network volume, which can be slow even for small files.

I need to submit documents to a client in Microsoft Word format using the Times font. I have and use Word 2016, but it's not what I like. I downloaded NeoOffice 2017.17 Professional Edition and like it with one exception: I cannot get it to use the Times font. Using the Times font in LibreOffice works, but I find the onscreen view of LibreOffice annoying. Any suggestions on how to make NeoOffice 2017.17 use the Times fonts?

Microsoft AutoUpdate is reporting that a new version of Office (16.25) is available for download, but, as is the norm, the Release Notes and Update History web page linked to by AutoUpdate has not been updated yet to reflect the current release.

I notice, however, that there is a post announcing the update in Microsoft's Office Forum, and it links to a separate "What's New" page that has information about the 16.25 release.

[I think new icons], incidentally, are annoying. They are more consistent with each other but harder to decipher at a glance. The periodic and apparently random ten-second freeze, a cross-platform feature, now works in Excel, too.

I have a complex spreadsheet that I created in Excel 2011. It contains a dozen or so tabs, several pivot tables, a number of graphs, many named cells and ranges (including calculated ranges), and macros.

I just purchased Office 365 Home and tried opening the spreadsheet in the latest version of Excel. I receive an alert stating "We found a problem with some content in 'Investments Analysis copy.xlsm'. Do you want us to try to recover as much as we can? If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes."

If I click Yes, the spreadsheet opens, but lots of problems are instantly apparent. Graphs are missing, Formulas aren't working, because certain named ranges were lost. Column sizes are all off. I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg, since I haven't even attempted to execute any of my macros.

Is anyone aware of a reference to known breakage in spreadsheets converting to Office 365 and fixes or workarounds?

I have a complex spreadsheet that I created in Excel 2011. It contains ... many named cells and ranges (including calculated ranges)...
I just purchased Office 365 Home and tried opening the spreadsheet...

OK, after much sweat just to recreate a simple stacked column chart that was lost (*&^%$#$%), I discovered that none of the name ranges survived!...

Does anyone know of a way to print, export, copy, or otherwise capture all the named ranges, and their definitions, in Excel 2011?

... OK, In Excel help, I searched for Names and found this:

You can create a list of all the names that are assigned to cells in a workbook. Locate an area with two empty columns on the sheet (the list will contain two columns — one for the name and one for the cells referenced by the name). Select the cell that will be the upper-left corner of the list. On the Insert menu, point to Name, and then click Paste. In the Paste Name dialog box, click Paste List.

I do not deal with complex spreadsheets, but for file conversions in general I often end up using LibreOffice. It might be able to consume the Excel 2011 document and then spit it out in a format that Excel 365 can deal with.

For personal documents that I am not working on with others, I usually leave them in the LibreOffice default format (ODF, ODS, etc.) with confidence that they will continue to be readable long after LibreOffice has been replaced by whatever might come.

I do not deal with complex spreadsheets, but for file conversions in general I often end up using LibreOffice. It might be able to consume the Excel 2011 document and then spit it out in a format that Excel 365 can deal with.

Another thing to try is to open the file through successively newer versions of Excel and/or in Excel for Windows. I know, in the past, I've had complex Word documents (with equations, tables, figures, etc.) that wouldn't render correctly in the most recent version of Word. However, opening, say, a Word 5.1a file in (for example - I don't remember the exact versions) Word X, saving; then opening in Word 2008, saving; then finally opening in Word 2016 resulted in a mostly correct document.

Speaking of the Office 2016 update... the Microsoft Auto Updater acts like it downloads and installs the update, but afterward I am left with the same version of Word as before. The other 3 Office apps did get updated from 16.16.10 to 16.16.11, but Word remains at 16.16.10.

Shutting down and restarting the Mac didn't help. Auto Updater tried again today, but with the same result. Anybody else have this issue? Am running High Sierra on a late 2014 Mac Mini. This has never happened to me before with Auto Updater.

Microsoft AutoUpdate checks if there is a new version of MS AutoUpdate - typically there is - downloads it, and installs. You have to run it a second time to check if there are updates to the Microsoft [Office] software.

(Only Microsoft could come up with such a lame interpretation of 'auto'.)

Microsoft AutoUpdate checks if there is a new version of MS AutoUpdate - typically there is - downloads it, and installs. You have to run it a second time to check if there are updates to the Microsoft [Office] software.

Yep, that's what I wound up doing. It succeeded in installing Word 16.16.11 but also installed something called Office365ServiceV2.app that opens every time I open Word. (I don't even have Office365.) I dragged it to the Trash. Word now opens as expected, without the other annoyance.

Speaking of the Office 2016 update... the Microsoft Auto Updater acts like it downloads and installs the update, but afterward I am left with the same version of Word as before. The other 3 Office apps did get updated from 16.16.10 to 16.16.11, but Word remains at 16.16.10.

You might check if you have a second copy of Word on your Mac. I saw this on a Mac that kept asking to update Office. One copy did get (repeatedly) updated to 16.16.11. However, the next time the auto updater ran, it again saw the 16.16.10 version and so asked to install the update. The updater would always "update" the same copy, even though it was already at 16.16.11, leaving the 16.16.10 copy untouched. I just removed the second copy and all was fine.

For the Windows 7, 8, and 10 users out there, Microsoft also just released updates for a "Critical" set of vulnerabilities in its Remote Desktop Services. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities does not require user action, so you should give strong consideration to patching or mitigating the vulnerabilities. Ars Technica has more information: